Thursday, September 14, 2017

Depression plagued even one of Canada's most celebrated authors.Once upon a time, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s stories had been enjoyed by men, women, boys and girls of all ages — even the Prime Minister of Great Britain sang her praises. But now her work was being dismissed by a new generation of male, modernist critics who claimed her books were too “sugary” to be enjoyed by anyone but little girls, and that her stories were too regional — too Canadian — to have any appeal for a worldwide audience. “Canadian fiction,” according to one of Montgomery’s harshest and most influential critics, “was to go no lower.”